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<TITLE>About the Design Research Institute</TITLE>
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<H1>Design Research Institute</H1>

<H2>Overview</H2>
The Design Research Institute is an organization of collaborating
industry and academic scientists and engineers devoted to research
bringing computer science and computation technology to bear on
problems of engineering design.

<P>DRI was established in 1990 by Cornell University and Xerox Corporation and is located in the 
<!WA1><!WA1><!WA1><!WA1><A HREF="http://www.tc.cornell.edu/ctc.html">Center for Theory and Simulation in Science
and Engineering</A>
on the Cornell campus in Ithaca, New York.

<P>The Institute was founded on the principle that American research
universities represent a major resource that can and should be employed in
America's effort to improve its industrial global competitiveness.

<P>At present, five Xerox scientists form the nucleus of DRI,
collaborating in research with Cornell faculty, students,
post-doctoral fellows, and visiting scientists in the College of
Engineering. Research problems are motivated by industry but solved
through the pooled talents and expertise of the combined DRI
community. It is anticipated that additional companies and Cornell
units will participate as the Institute grows.

<P>The DRI mission is <b>Pace to Product</b>, that is, to develop
technologies and methodologies for accelerating the design and
engineering of technology-based products.

DRI research currently encompasses three themes:
<UL>
<LI> <!WA2><!WA2><!WA2><!WA2><A HREF="#icap"><b>Information capture and access</b></A> - developing a <i>Corporate Memory of
Design</i>, a heterogeneous information base capturing designs and
design experiences and featuring high-level query and browsing
capabilities in support of engineering processes and decisions.

<LI> <!WA3><!WA3><!WA3><!WA3><A HREF="#prototyping"><b>Computational Prototyping</b></A> - 
developing scientific computing
algorithms and applications, and computing environments for their use, to
enable mechanical, fluid, and other physical systems to be simulated
by computer, reducing the need for building hardware prototypes.

<LI><!WA4><!WA4><!WA4><!WA4><A HREF="#collaboration"><b> Collaboration technology</b></A>
- developing tools and methods for
sharing of engineering information and creating shared engineering
work spaces.
</ul>

Since the issues of engineering productivity addressed by DRI are of
concern to much of American industry, a goal is to secure federal or other
outside funding to support the Cornell associates of DRI. Industry staff are
supported by their companies.

<P>Most DRI research is non-proprietary. Software prototypes are
implemented to demonstrate concepts and show feasibility, and results
are published in technical reports and journals.  As appropriate,
technology is expected to be freely transferred into partner
companies.

<H2>DRI Partners</H2>

The Design Research Institute is a partnership of industry, academia,
and government.

<P><B>Industry.</B> Corporations can participate in the Institute by engaging in
the research of DRI, generally by establishing groups of research scientists
and engineers on campus. Companies take the lead in setting the research
agenda and have access to the research results of all of DRI.

<P><B>Academia.</B> Cornell University is the host institution for the
Design Research Institute. Faculty, staff, and students in the College
of Engineering work closely with industry scientists in collaborative
research. DRI offices and laboratories are located in the Center for
Theory and Simulation in Science and Engineering and in the
Department of Computer Science, and collaboration extends to the
Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Departments
of Electrical Engineering and Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. Future involvement is expected in
other units of the College of Engineering as well as the School
of Industrial and Labor Relations and the Johnson School of Management.

<P><B>Government</B>. It is anticipated that government or other external
organizations will fund part of the research of DRI since the research
goal of the Institute is to develop technologies that will enhance the
competitiveness of all of American industry. Such funding will support
Cornell affiliated staff, not industry staff.

<H2>Mission: Accelerating the Pace of Product Development</H2>

The research mission of the Design Research Institute is to develop
technologies and methodologies for increasing the pace of development
of technology-based products such as aircraft, computing and communications
equipment, automobiles, machine tools, office equipment, and
composite materials.

<P>DRI research is expected to lead ultimately to shorter product
development cycles. This focus on the time element of engineering
reflects the importance of time to market in today's global competitive
environment.

<P>Research projects seek to leverage massive computation, multimedia,
networks, and heterogeneous database technologies to enable more
effective engineering by both individuals and work groups.

<P>Three themes form the heart of the DRI research agenda: information
capture and access, computational prototyping, and collaboration
technology. Research in these areas is directed toward facilitating
more effective engineering decision-making and developing means to
eliminate or accelerate engineering tasks.

<A name=icap>
<H2>Information Capture and Access</H2>
</A>

One goal of DRI is to develop technologies for an enriched information
and document environment that enables increased worker productivity in
project-oriented tasks, especially that of engineering design.

<P>DRI research in information capture and access involves a multitude of
technologies: distributed databases and persistent object storage,
document image processing and management, multimedia and user
interface technology, information science for heterogeneous data, and
knowledge representation and organization.

<P>A centerpiece for this work is a vision of a <i>Corporate Memory of Design</i>,
a distributed collection of all the information pertaining to product
development: documents, drawings, schedules, catalogs, field service
records, minutes of meetings, records of decisions, and histories of past
projects.

<P>Initial contents of the DRI prototype Corporate Memory will be
engineering reports in scanned and synthetic document form,
engineering drawings, photographs of engineers along with records of
their areas of expertise and project assignments, and computational
prototyping programs, complete with documentation and sample
visualization output.  The Corporate Memory will not be centralized,
but rather will be spread across many computers in many sites linked
by network. It will be closely integrated with public information
sources such as electronic libraries and national online
databases.

<P>The Corporate Memory will support a wide variety of uses through
specialized interfaces tailored to various applications. For example, an
engineer may receive automatic notification of any engineering change on
his project by electronic mail. A manager may have a permanent project
status window on his or her workstation refreshed by a program that continuously
queries the Memory for schedule references. A departmental document
scanner may automatically file in the Memory all documents pertinent to
a particular project. Parametric design programs may sift through previous
designs for best matches to new requirements.

<P>The application-specific clients of the Memory will all share a layer
of intelligent access capabilities such as near-miss querying,
browsing, natural language interfaces, and self-organization of the
content of the Memory.

<P>An information capture and access testbed is now being implemented.
It is based on several existing information and document systems ranging
from an electronic notebook system to network document and database
access systems to information filters and interfaces. These systems will be
integrated into a unified environment supporting experiments with and
development of enabling technologies for the Corporate Memory.

<A name=prototyping>
<H2>Computational Prototyping</H2>
</A>

Computational prototyping involves the simulation by computer of
complex physical systems and visual display of their behavior to
engineers.  This process, enabled by high-speed network access to
supercomputers, high-performance graphics workstations, scientific
visualization technology, and new parallel computing algorithms, will
replace some of the time consuming building of hardware prototypes with
interactive design at the workstation.

<P>Successful simulations have to date been achieved in several key
physical domains, including flow of fluid and heat in a thermal ink
jet print-head, free surface ejection of a droplet from an acoustically
excited pool of liquid, electrostatic interactions of toner particles
in a xerographic development system, lubricant flow in bearings, and
charge transport in semiconductors. New methods have been developed to
solve these problems on supercomputers. Ultimately the simulations
will run fast enough for interactive use by engineers.

<P>An emerging focus area in Computational Prototyping is
Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems. In collaboration with departments of
Electrical Engineering and Theoretical and Applied Mechanics,
computational tools are being developed that will lead to an improved
understanding of MEMS electromechanical behaviors. Specific areas of
research include reliability and failure modes in these structures, as
well as techniques for sensitivity analysis and optimal design of
MEMS. This project is being funded by the NSF's MEMS program.
 
<P>A research goal is to develop a flexible, powerful, yet friendly
environment supplying computational and graphics resources that enable
an engineer to employ simulation as an everyday design tool. The DRI
vision is of an integrated environment providing easy-to-use
simulation and visualization capabilities for engineers at Xerox and
other partner companies driven by Cornell supercomputers. Intelligent
browsing capability and online documentation are key components of
the vision.

<P>Building toward this goal is <i>Protolab</i>, a computing
environment for engineering simulation featuring automatic generation
of simulation programs from high-leVel descriptions and an object
oriented library of models and methods.  A research proposal on the
development of Protolab, submitted jointly with General Electric and
Cornell Computer Science, has been selected as a potential funding
candidate by ARPA.

<A NAME=collaboration>
<H2>Collaboration Technology</H2>
</A>

The Design Research Institute recognizes that the way engineers work
together as a team is as important as their individual contributions.
Thus collaboration technology forms the third component of the DRI
research agenda. DRI activities in this area are in providing shared
access to objects in the Corporate Memory and in enabling effective
communication among engineers. Toward the latter, a cooperative
engineering environment is under development featuring structured
dialog among members of a team to facilitate resolution of engineering
changes during product design.

<P>Research in this area is just beginning, but is expected to grow to
involve analysis of engineering processes and development of
additional tools to facilitate collaboration. Of special interest is
enabling effective teamwork among engineers separated by several time
zones.

<H2>Corporate Participation</H2>

Companies joining the Institute typically will participate by locating
research staff on campus. In the case of Xerox, the founding partner, a
group of seven scientists within the Corporate Research Group was
permanently established at Cornell. Xerox provides to Cornell a yearly
grant which offsets the cost of its offices and support services.

<P>Corporate partners benefit from participation in DRI in several ways.

<P>The companies leverage both their intellectual investment and their
financial investment through participation in collaborative research with
university faculty and students as well as scientists from other partner
companies. Government or other external funding is expected to support
the Cornell affiliates.

<P>Through on-site collaboration, partner companies have direct
involvement in establishing the research agenda of the Institute.
Problems can be drawn from an industrial context and distilled into
fundamental research questions. This approach provides a new scale and
perspective that is unusual in academic research, but which promises
exceptional synergy.

<P>Partner companies also have convenient first access to research
developments in DRI, including research involving scientists from other
companies. There are many avenues of technology transfer, including
joint projects with off-campus company units and hosting of visiting
scientists on campus.

<H2>Intellectual Property Rights</H2>

Most research in the Design Research Institute is intended to be open
and non-proprietary. Results will be available for use by partner companies
as developed and will be published in scientific journals as appropriate.

<P>To cover ownership rights to inventions deriving from current DRI
research, an intellectual property rights agreement has been reached in
principle between Cornell and Xerox. It provides that rights to inventions
of a Xerox employee shall be covered by standard Xerox policy and that
rights to inventions of a Cornell employee shall be covered by standard
Cornell policy. In the case of a joint invention by Xerox and Cornell
employees, rights shall be jointly owned.  Joint ownership generally implies
that each party has the right to use or license the invention independently
as either party wishes. In the case of DRI, joint ownership has been
redefined by the parties for the mutual benefit of both parties.

<P>When additional corporate partners join DRI the issue of intellectual
property rights will be revisited, but it is expected that agreements
developed to cover the new partners will be similar to the
Xerox-Cornell model.

<H2>Steering Committee and Institute Organization</H2>

Policy for the Institute is established by a Steering Committee, whose
membership includes representatives of Cornell and each of the
partner companies. At present the committee consists of three Cornell
members and five Xerox members.

<P>When additional corporate partners join DRI, an Institute office will
be created to augment the offices of the individual companies. A director is
expected to be named at that time. Until then, Cornell and Xerox are
sharing in the administration of DRI.

<P>As the Institute grows, it is envisioned to include separate branches
focusing on key areas of DRI research. The branches will engage various
units of Cornell, and partner companies and government agencies may
participate in any or all of the branches as they choose.

<HR>

Design Research Institute<br>
502 Engineering and Theory Center<br>
Cornell University<br>
Ithaca NY 14853-3801<br>
607-255-4933<br>

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